ARCHITECTURE VIEW

ARCHITECTURE VIEW; In San Francisco, a Good Idea Falls With a Thud

By Paul Goldberger

Published: August 12, 1990

SAN FRANCISCO—
When Browning said that a museum's reach must exceed its grasp -all right, I know he didn't quite say that, but it is hard not to wish he had after seeing the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's major summer exhibition, ''Visionary San Francisco.'' For this is one of the most ambitious, and admirable, efforts to address the realm of architecture and cities that any museum in the country has mounted in the last decade. That it doesn't quite come off - or that the most ambitious aspects of the exhibition come off the least - is no discredit to this museum's impressive reach. At a time when most museums are ignoring architecture, or playing it safe by presenting small retrospectives of the work of individual architects, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has taken on an entire city, trying to show us how San Francisco has traditionally defined itself through its dreams.

''Visionary San Francisco,'' which will remain on view through Aug. 26, is the largest effort to date of the museum's seven-year-old department of architecture, which is under the direction of Paolo Polledri. Mr. Polledri's thesis is that San Francisco, a city that once moved ahead with a self-assurance equal to that of ancient Rome, has now deteriorated into a provincial factionalism, its every move stymied by conflicting interests. The city desperately lacks a sense of a ''shared vision,'' he states in his introduction to the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, and he makes clear that his motivation in mounting the show is to attempt to stimulate the city's public spirit once again.

So far, no argument. Mr. Polledri asks the right questions, including his final one, ''Why visions at all when we need deeds?'' a query that the exhibition itself can be taken as an attempt to answer. The exhibition consists of two parts: an expansive historical section, which reviews visionary schemes for San Francisco from the city's formative years before the 1906 earthquake all the way up to the present, and a much more problematic section presenting new visions of the city. These new visions come not from politicians or planners but from teams of architects and writers. Four writers were commissioned to prepare essays inspired by San Francisco, and then four architects were asked to respond to them with actual designs or pieces of art.

It's the historical section that is the more successful by far. No surprise there, perhaps: it's a lot easier to dig through archives than to create fresh inspiration, and the material Mr. Polledri and his associates have unearthed is splendid. It includes magnificent renderings by Willis Polk, Jules Guerin and Emile Benard for monumental Beaux-Arts projects for San Francisco and Berkeley, original drawings for San Francisco's great bridges, and a megastructure the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange proposed in 1969 for Yerba Buena Center, a site south of Market Street that is still largely undeveloped.

San Francisco has always dreamed grandly, and had noble ambitions for itself. Why should it not, this city that has always seemed too beautiful to be truly an American city? In San Francisco, as in New York, imperial ambitions have always coexisted with a kind of messy vitality bordering on vulgarity; the clash of these things gives a special energy that makes the city not like other places - an energy that is tempered by the extraordinary landscape of San Francisco Bay, which allows the whole place to bask in a mellow, self-assured glow.

We see all of that in ''Visionary San Francisco'': the glorious dome of Bernard Maybeck's Palace of Fine Arts, centerpiece (and lasting remnant) of the fantastic Beaux-Arts cityscape of the 1916 Panama-Pacific Exposition; the Art Deco towers of Timothy Pflueger, as good as those in the East, and the incredible Golden Gate Bridge, perhaps the one man-made structure in this country that does more than any other to enhance a spectacular natural site.

Yet for all the majesty here, my favorite object in this section was an advertisement from The San Francisco Chronicle that was sponsored by the Motor Car Dealers Association of San Francisco. It ran in May 1921, a time when the city was torn by controversy over whether the Bay Bridge joining San Francisco to Oakland should be built. ''Our bay is a Chinese wall,'' the ad began. ''Rome's greatness was lasting because of her roads. . . . We need a bridge that will carry motor traffic to and from across the bay. One tie-up on our ferries and we swim, but you can't tie up a bridge,'' the ad smirked, with stunning naivete. The ad concluded with a plea: ''Is there nothing for us to do but sit behind our Chinese wall and dream of the past glories of San Francisco, bowing our heads in worship of the deeds of our ancestors?''

How deftly this ad reminds us that our age is not, in the end, the only one to be fearful of taking big steps, and that San Francisco, even back in the 1920's, was already indulging in a deep attachment to its past! But it also tells us that there was not ever quite as neat a ''shared vision'' as Mr. Polledri may wish us to believe - that major projects always led to controversy, that change was always wrenching. What made earlier eras different from our own was not hesitation over change but the fact that power then was more tightly held than it is today, and consensus more easily reached. It was easier for a small circle of politicians and businessmen to will a project into existence 50 years ago than it is now - and while that may have resulted in a certain sense of a common vision, it may have come as much by default as from anything else.